Mary Schmich's classic graduation speech has a line which sums up my view on this very well: "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself." I don't worry about whether I'll be remembered after my death because 1) nobody remembers me now and 2) I'm not here on this good earth to satisfy some hypothetical future assessors (and nor were those who became great and remembered).
However, unlike others, I won't say that you should necessarily find meaning elsewhere. The lines of Dylan Thomas' poem "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." come to mind. Much like an arcade game player trying to beat their own high score, you can, if you choose, to continue "running the race" for greatness solely for your own satisfaction and, at the end of your days, take comfort in knowing that you achieved as much as you could've with the hand you were dealt. And, who knows? Maybe fame and fortune will find you along the way.
Mark Zuckerberg won’t be mentioned much a few years after his death despite being one of the richest humans and accomplishing it in his early 20s. Sure we remember Steve Jobs, but almost nobody bothers to think about him other than for a moment here and there. We’re almost all connected by that lack of permanence, from kings to commoners. Even the people we remember have very little impact in the mindspace of people’s day to day life.
We remember the works of Euclid, Plato, Socrates, Newton, Shakespeare, the Wright Brothers, Einstein etc.
I imagine none of these people spared much thought as to whether they were mediocre or would be remembered. They just did what they felt compelled to do.
One other thing that people say is that they will have kids and leave part of themselves. Ha. Ha, I say.
Your children have half, or .5, of your genetic code. Grandchildren have 1/4 or .25. Great-grandchildren have .125 of your DNA. You see where this is going.
In 15 generations, or 450 years from now in 2471 AD(or, 450 years ago is 1571 AD), your DNA in your 15-great-grandchild will be 0.0030517578125%. Your 30th progeny in 900 years from now in 2921 AD (or in 1121 AD), your DNA in your 30-great-grandchildren will be 0.00000009313225746155%.
Of course, this is assuming that all of your line does not go extinct, which is a distinct possibility. You're not Genghis Khan, after all.
It's the fate of everything to eventually be forgotten anyway. Whether by heat death or big crunch, all information that is ever created in this universe will not survive the end of the universe. Socrates, Shakespeare, and Jesus are just as insignificant meaningless specks in the grand scheme as I am. And they're just as dead as I'll be.
Just be grateful you ever existed at all. Matter banging into itself somehow clumped together in such a way that it formed memories and experiences and we all got to be a part of that. It's as close to magic as this world gets. It's temporary and it's pointless, but man, forever in the eternity of the four-dimensional firmament of spacetime is an infinitesimal slice that touches almost nothing else, but that slice is my life. Enjoy it while you can. You'll enjoy it a lot more if you're not constantly fretting about whether some other far-off corner that becomes self-aware knows about you or not.
Besides that, there is a hell of a lot of space between Shakespeare and mediocrity. I'm not saying give up and despair because nothing matters, but the fact that you won't be remembered by anyone but your family, and even they'll soon be gone, and soon all humans at all will be gone, and soon all entropy will be gone, doesn't make you mediocre.
Did they change the world enough for you to notice and know their names? no. Were they mediocre? No.
Family and friends are actually the only relationships that really matter, everything else is a little less. Still important but not as much.
So I can speak to this, because it's been my entire life, and because I've had to think about it on my own in the early days, since you don't have peers that can discuss death and existential meaning from 5-12.
You know what is the best feeling in the world? After all the striving and effort, relationships, etc.. it's the black stillness when you pass from time and space, and it may freak you out conceptually, but it is actually delightful to not experience anything, before each procedure and before I went under I always knew I might die and after the first time I always was a little disappointed when my eyes opened again. It's just that good.
Ok, so why am I still alive? I'm curious and I have nothing to lose by sticking around to see if anything insane happens while I am alive, there's a lot of weird and interesting things in the world, not everything under the sun has been seen, new things appear constantly.
As a kid I once watched ants climbing a porcelain wall, and I had just learned that soap stops their trail, so I tried it and it did... and congestion backed up and they were lost, and I wondered what would happen, and after a bit I saw down near the bottom of this wall an ant moving fast and the other ants moved from its path ever so slightly so it was like watching the wake of a boat, and this ant got to the line and launched itself over, into the unknown and reopened the path, and this happened each time... and I realized that those ants were badasses and terminally cool, and that's how I wanted to live. Always exploring new paths.
The famous man and the poor man's experience in the grave is the great equalizer, everything in between, including the mundane can be unbound newness if you have and cultivate genuine wonder and curiosity.. and ultimately embrace intellectual humility.. we have no idea where existence might take us next, what a curious life and time.
Ants don’t seem to care about legacy: one ant is pretty much the same as every other one and each life isn’t that important to the functioning of their community. All they seem to care about is the good of the colony and doing their job well. Ants are amazing creatures.
I hope the creatures we are ants to see us the same way.
Most people shrink their world until their actions feel like they have meaning. Rich, smart, and powerful people do this too. A person may not be important in the context of the whole world but they can feel like an important person in their relationship, family, job, or hobby. To an outsider, the relationship is boring, the kids are spoiled, the job is pointless, and the hobby is silly and embarrassing. But to the person themselves it's all satisfying, validating, fascinating, and joyful.
You and I are no better. We can't escape this same fate for ourselves. All we can do is find the way _we_ want to be tricked. It's sad and ridiculous but that's part of why it's fun and beautiful.
Time and experience for the most part. Impermanence is also a central tenant of Buddhist philosophy and there are lots of books on the subject. Siddhartha is also a great read here.
"with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably - that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life. It has often been observed that true gain is in the struggle and not in the achievement- a life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living."
What has always been important to me was to realize:
Good outcomes for society do not require a handful of geniuses. Good outcomes for society require thousands of risk-takers who are willing to throw themselves at hard problems. Almost all will fail. But it's necessary that they try, or no progress will be made.
So whatever your ambition is or was: It matters that you tried.
For myself there's a huge range in between mediocrity and being remembered by strangers after my death. At the end of your life you will judge how well you fulfilled your own principles. The best you can hope for is that you have found the principles that will stick with you and that you're living up to them. Effectively you create a unique value system, a sort of sandbox game with the world as the sandbox. If others share your principles you can play together. Find passion, and strive. Remember that most regrets in the end are not for what you've done but rather not done.
The premise underlying the question is that mostly everyone is obsessed with fame and impractical expectations of success. I would say that maybe that does exist, at least in some cultures. I would say the first thing to acknowledge in changing that is that the teacher, parent, [other] who instilled these ideas in you were wrong. This should lead to the realization that much of what society has "taught" us was more of an indoctrination rather than a truly objective evaluation of the concepts presented to us and those concepts discovered in other ways/forums.
Edit: you should also read Man’s Search for Meaning by Richard Frankel.
Celebrities and publicly known personalities of all sorts seem to have coping problems. With current information technology, they attract thousands of fanboys and hundreds of haters. They cannot distinguish true friends from sycophants anymore. Their personal life suffers from lack of privacy.
If being great comes with popularity (which it often does, nowadays), it is a double-edged sword.
Also very few people will be remembered for very long after their death, outside of a few people close to them. There's too much input out there for people to dwell on the memories of someone for too long. I hate to admit it, but I don't think about my grandparents (who are all dead now) as much as I probably should, and they were all great people.
I mean, how much do most people in a given field know about most of the great thinkers in their field outside of their last name on a few concepts, or maybe they read an article or a book about them once? And even if it wasn't them that came up with it, would possibly another person come up with the same or similar idea a bit further out? Newton and Leibniz separately both came up with the ideas of Calculus (with different approaches) around the same time, for example.
I also think it's getting harder to make discoveries or do great (novel) things nowadays. Most of the low-hanging fruit has been pulled in science and computer science, for example, and most of what's available now are big huge hard to solve problems (see Millenium Prize Problems[1]) or unified theory problems, or can't really be discovered without better and more expensive instruments (more powerful telescopes and microscopes, particle accelerators, etc), so it's a lot harder for someone to come up with something really novel nowadays. It's still out there, it just requires a lot more effort and can't easily be done with homemade or budget instruments.
So I wouldn't beat yourself up about it too much. Keep trying, sure, but understand you might not succeed, and come to terms with that.
Would you like to have an experience evaluating your self-worth?
I'm making decent money (enough to survive to western world standards, which is the golden standard when you look at it) and I still remember fondly helping an injured person survive, as part of my job as a rescue worker. It was a team effort, I got to meet them 6 months afterwards, they were kind enough to bring their x-ray to the station, prompted by the doctors that said our team effort prevented them from being permanently paralyzed. I remember my childhood friend, who is a trauma surgeon, smiling at me knowingly: yeah, it's the ultimate high. You don't beat death or the devil, you get to tip the scale a bit, but it is the ultimate high.
Do you want to experience a moment of true self evaluation? That is cheap, but not easy. Meditate on the moment of you own death. One suggested practice is breathing exercises. No one path is better than the other, but this may be one of the paths:
- Count your exhalations, backwards, from 10, on a loop. Sit or walk during.
- Try to locate where your mind is in your body. Is it in your head? Where? Keep asking: "Where is my mind?". It is not the words that matter, direct your attention to finding the source of your attention.
- Listen to silence around you, no matter the noise. Noise can be words in your head, loud movement external to you, whatever, listen to the silence around it. If you combine these three activities, breath count, mind location, silence focus, the "daily" mind becomes overwhelmed. Don't do this when driving or any other activity that requires 100% attention.
As far as self-evaluation, wherever you go, there you are. Whether people remember you or not, is besides the point. What do you really remember about yourself?
This was probably the most terrifying thing I have experienced in my life. I haven't been brave enough to do it twice, though I understand the potential benefits.
(1) Among the set of people currently recognized as "great" - while most of them do have considerable talent, for the vast majority of them, their "greatness" comes from the trifecta of: having talent; being in the right place at the right moment of history (i.e. luck); and having the intuition (and trusting that intuition) to grab that moment by the horns and ride it as far as they can go with it. (In addition to of course working extremely hard, but we all know that part already).
Many titans of industry (e.g. Bezos, Jobs, Gates) clearly excel in all three magic layers of this "trifecta". But the important thing to realize is that it isn't just a matter of talent - luck has a hell of a lot to do with achieving "greatness", especially its rarefied upper strata.
(2) Many who do become "great" do so at considerable personal cost - be it broken interpersonal relationships, negative health consequences; and/or becoming assholes and or white collar criminals.
(3) For every person admitted to the inner sanctum of "greatness" there's a huge, huge number of people who either fail or (more likely) simply opt out - especially when they take stock of the fact that the price of admission likely involves a significant risk of falling the category described in item (2).
(4) Finally the whole "great man" (person, whatever) notion of history is - as any genuinely great person (recognized or otherwise) will tell you - fundamentally bollocks. The vast majority of "great things" that happen do so as the emergent result of many people (sometimes, like in WW II, a great many people) not trying to be "great", but simply doing the right thing -- and having the courage and foresight to put aside their self-interest in doing so.
So in a nutshell... the best way to deal with one's "failure" to become great is to screw the goal of becoming "great" altogether. And to focus more on actions in more in category (4) above... while of course avoiding actions in category (2).
Does being 'great' (or rich, famous, powerful, etc) let you get to that thing you enjoy? What is the value in being 'great'?
When I think about 'why' I want those things, I often realize they're dumb human status-seeking things. In the end just create more stress. The reality is I just find joy in the work itself, and am happiest when I can let go of those other things.
Further, the reality is there's not a single dimension to measure people. Everyone has unique superpowers and weaknesses. The dimensionality on how someone can be "great" is so massive to be useless.
At times I have found myself in the position of choosing a career that can be considered successful, but I have thought, can this make me happy?, and being the answer "NO", I have rejected it. Now I have realised that my path does not overlap with the current standards, no problem, I will not send my soul in the name of the quality parameters of others.
All this to say, mediocrity to whom? If it is to you, fight against it, if it is to others, do not care a lot
If you don't have a sustainable system it doesn't matter how much control you have at the moment. Unfortunately in our society success is not measured by sustainability, it's measured by self-interest, also known as the tragedy of the commons.
There is no reason to think about one's legacy if our entire race won't make it out of the 21st century.
Or look at it this way...even places like Harvard and MIT and Stanford only have one person who graduates first in their class. These are high-end universities with the best and brightest. How do all the people who didn't graduate first in their class even live without committing suicide for not being the best? Let alone those who graduated last in their class at some tiny no-name university that no one has ever heard of, and compare themselfves to someone who graduated first in their class at Harvard? Why even try to get a job?
But I think at the heart of it all is not about mediocrity, but about comparing oneself to others. This is not about mediocrity, but about self-image, self-respect, and mainly about not giving a f-ck about other people.
As far as how do you get to that point, you have to immerse and care about something that you care about. And that does not have to be static for your entire life, you can get new hobbies and ideas. I don't have a family, so clearly it won't ever be that. But at various times, I have cared about many other things at different parts of my life, like hiking with a group of people which I did for 2 years, martial arts which I did for 20 years, running in ultramarathons, which I did for about 5 years. Executive director of a large non-profit. And in between each of these activities, I had some downtime where I didn't really do anything.
But one does have to make an effort. One cannot just sit in their basement waiting for it to happen. If you like to travel, you have to travel. If one likes to cook, one has to cook. But again, is one going to travel as much as a professional traveler who does it full-time? Or cook as good as someone with training at the best cooking schools and at the best restaurants in the world? No.
But I didn't compare myself to all the best, because I am mediocre in everything compared to the best. I like that have done many many things, though, that most people have not. Who has done all the things that I have - 6th degree black belt, run 50+ miles at one time, etc? But I was pretty mediocre in each compared to itself. By far and away not the best in martial arts, never won any sort of competition in ultras.
And part of it is you have to embrace the suck, if that makes sense. Have a Plan B is important. Lots of peoples' identities are caught up in what they do. Like, they don't know what to do if they all of a sudden cannot do what they are best at. Happens all the time. Like professional athletes, they get injured in their first month of being in the NBA or NFL, and they fall to pieces and think they are valueless. Well, you have to not tie up your identity in any one thing. You are you, not what you do.
I guess one is not mediocre if one does what one likes to 100% of their abilities, in whatever one wants. But even then, don't get caught up in the 100% "all the time" thing. There are days when I have done all my activities and one day I will just suck at what I'm doing, or for weeks at a time I will only go at 70% or 50%, but then, in week 3, I will see a lot of gains and get way better. Some people say you have to give 100% each and every time but that is bullsh*t. Nobody can except some super rare individual. I even heard Michael Phelps, who won so many Olympic gold metals, say in a video that he has had shitty days in training - not 100%. Does he just quit, then? No.
So, anyways, lots of words which give a tone and timbre to my overall feeling about the matter.
The answer is that you have to find things that you care about, and do them. And do them as best you can, but don't get too tied up in them. Things change. Be ready to find other things you want to do in life. Drink deeply from the cup of life. But be ready to find something else. For example, if you have a family and all of them get wiped out in a car accident except you, be prepared to move on after understandable time of utter desolation and grief. Let the dead bury the dead and all that. Nothing lasts forever, and eventually, your whole family is going to die anyways, right? So many times we all read about people being devastated when a spouse leaves them, or is caught cheating. Really? Come on, don't be 5 years old. 50% of the population divorces, so how can one be "utterly blindsided"? So the point is, you cannot really even depend on what you said in your last sentence, that what matters if family, or hobbies, or religion. Not 100%. Many men I have known have had their children snatched away from them in a divorce - they go from seeing their children every day, being happy and love their children and gives them a great source of enjoyment in life, and then a divorce and they only see their children every other weekend, instead of every day. So you have to always have Plan B and move on to that. What matters is to enjoy stuff when you can, but always, always have a Plan B to move on to something else you enjoy. But it takes work and effort. You actually have to go to a hiking group, or put one together. It's not passive.